Welcome back to Ancient Wisdom, our series in which writers over 70 tell us how they are aging gracefully. Last week, Susie Kaufman, who writes the Substack Seventysomething, described the joys of the cha-cha at age 80. This week, Michael Friedman, 82, writes about dealing with the grief he has felt since losing his lifelong soulmate, his wife Harriet.
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My wife of nearly 49 years died from pancreatic cancer six months ago. I held her as she took her last labored breaths. She was 81 years old.
Harriet had had a long life and, as she said repeatedly while she was dying, a happier life than she ever expected. She accepted the inevitability of her death gracefully, and dare I say, optimistically.
To my surprise, I wasn’t ready to accept it. We had prepared, I thought. She and I had had all the conversations you should have about what we wanted to happen to our bodies and what kind of service we wanted. We had done our advance directives—wills, beneficiary designees, healthcare proxies, and all the rest of it. Our affairs were in order. We were ready.
Except: Our expectation had always been that I would die first, as men usually do, especially men like me with multiple chronic health conditions. Harriet had settled into the idea that she would be a widow, and so had I. She was close to her family and had many friends who would be there for her. We were both sure that her life after I died would continue to be fulfilling, and we were both comforted by that.
It turned out, when she was the one who died first, and I was the widower, I was not so ready after all. I was not ready to find myself crying with little provocation. I was not ready to be alone in our bed. I was not ready for her not to be there to talk to. As I said in my eulogy for her, when I finished writing it, I got up from my desk to go show it to her. I sat back down, stunned, when I realized she wasn’t there.
